Every Friday morning at 7 AM I meet with two missionaries to discuss a chapter of a book about diaspora missions that we are reading. This past week I was thankful to be introduced to new data and a new movement and to read about a new direction for current missions. This is because the direction for missions that our church is pursuing is at the forefront of this “latest version” of missions.
The direction for missions that our church is pursuing can be divided into two parts. Facing outside of London we have ‘unengaged unreached people group missions’, and facing into London we have ‘inner-city diaspora missions’. ‘unreached people groups’ became an important topic in missions from an early stage. At the most impactful mission conferences, The First International Congress on World Evangelization (1974) and the Second International Congress on World Evangelization (1989), it was agreed that missionaries should evangelize to unreached people groups and subsequently all missions organizations and churches with interest in missions adopted this position.
However, even though this position was adopted early and ferverently pursued, when we look back we see that some groups have been neglected. Further, within unreached people groups, there are groups where missionaries haven’t even been able to step foot into. These groups are called ‘unengaged unreached people groups’. We have concentrated on missions to these groups from 2010. The most recent Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (2010) in South Africa focused on the topic of diaspora missions. This will be an important topic in missions going into the future.
Our church has been following the larger direction of global missions for the last 10 years. When I came to London in 2008, there was a missions conference in London where I first heard of ‘unengaged unreached people groups’ from Missionary Kang-Hee Ahn. That missionary was the only Korean missionary responsible for unengaged unreached people groups globally. Seventy-five percent of these unengaged unreached people groups are in India so I visited India and after that our church went on short-term mission trips there. Additionally, every month we take up an offering to be sent to missionaries in India.
In the middle of thinking and praying about how to work on these two mission goals, I became aware of the fact that London is a global city of many races and a mission field in and of itself and I felt confident that I should build a church for these people groups. So I visited areas of London where different people groups live together and joined the diaspora leaders meeting and even though we are different races I helped them plant a church. But I read in the book that by the year 2050, 70% of the world population will live in cities, so I thought that ‘inner-city diaspora missions’ would be an important mission for churches in the future.
Because not many people have explored these two directions for missions, it’s not clear exactly how we should do these missions and that makes it difficult. Because it’s a road that has not been travelled, it’s also exciting. But I believe that He who starts good works within us will lead me and our church.
